Obit watch: April 8, 2022.

Jimmy Wang Yu, martial arts movie guy.

A contract player at the start of his career, Wang’s early career was indelibly linked with Shaw Brothers, for better and worse, and he would become a mainstream star in the studio’s most famous wuxia films including One-Armed Swordsman (1967) which broke box office records in Hong Kong, Golden Swallow (1968), Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969) and ground-breaking kung fu film The Chinese Boxer (1970).

Another notable Wang film from this period was Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), which Quentin Tarantino would rank as one of his favorite films and that would later influence RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists.
By the 1980s, Wang’s career began to slow down, and he was better known for the scandals in his private life. There were reports of domestic abuse, continued reports of his alleged links to Triads and in Taiwan, he was charged with murder in 1981, but the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence.

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